Please note that the information contained in this article is technically a rumor, which comes from the chinese website Benchlife.info. That said, the publication has a very good track record with leak,s not to mention are reporting on something that makes sense. Nvidia has a gap in their price point lineup and according to the source, is preparing to fill it with a new edition to the family – probably based on the GM204 die (cut down).

The GTX 960 has 1024 CUDA Cores (in 8 SMMs) while as the GTX 970 has 1664 CUDA Cores (in 13 SMMs). If green is preparing a card that lies somewhere between the GTX 960 and GTX 970 then the card will probably have either 10 or 11 SMMs (for 1280 – 1408 CUDA Cores), both of which are comfortably spaced from the GTX 960 and GTX 970 respectively. The price points of the 960 and 970 are $199 and $329, so a card lying in the center will probably retail around the $249 mark.

Its worth nothing that the variant with 10 SMMs is more likely because Nvidia already has a GTX 960 OEM edition with 10 SMMs (1280 CUDA Cores), something it can brand as the GTX 960 Ti for the mainstream market. The OEM edition of the card also has a 192 bit bus width (an upgrade over the 128 bit bus width provided with the mainstream 960) which makes it a completely different card, even though the primary nomenclature is the same. Given below is a specification comparison of the two cards:

Comparison of Geforce GTX 960 and GTX 960 OEM

WCCFTech

Geforce GTX 960

Geforce GTX 960 OEM Edition

CUDA Cores

1024

1280

Base Clock/Boost

1127 /1178

924 / (TBC)

Texture Fill Rate

72 GT/s

74 GT/s

Memory Clock

7 Gbps

5 Gbps

Memory

2 GB GDDR5

3GB GDDR5

Memory Bus Width

128 bits

192 bits

Bandwidth

112 GB/s

120 GB/s

DirectX 12

Yes

Yes

Feature Level

12_1

12_1

The new card will naturally be based on the MX 2.0 architecture and will support DirectX 12 upto feature level 12_1. Since Pascal wont be arriving before the second quarter of 2016, Nvidia has to make sure its lineup is in tip top shape to compete against AMD. The company actually lost a bit of market share this quarter, and its relatively weak middle end lineup could be one reason for that. With a GTX 960 Ti (we don’t know what the final nomenclature would be, this is just a guess) competing against the Radeon R9 380X (which outclasses its Nvidia counterpart currently) the company would have a well balanced lineup in its mid-end as well.

Before we end this piece, I would like to note once again that this is a rumor, and should therefore be taken with a healthy amount of your favorite salt. Even though this seems logical, it is possible that Nvidia pulls a Maxwell 1.0 and releases pascal test chips as the 950 Ti/960 Ti respectively (like it did with the GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti). It is also my duty to point out that while the aforementioned is certainly a possibility, it is not a probability, since the chances of Nvidia repeating that marketing gimmick are quite slim.